Book Review: Participative Web and UCC

Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking

By Graham Vickery and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent

OECD 2006

Boiled down to three sentences
User Created Content is having various impacts on the Web, the people who use it and their societies and economies. But reliable information is hard to come by and hot damn this field is moving so fast that these guys didn't talk about facebook and twitter, which were gleams in a venture capitalist's eye back when it was written.

“Coolest” quote (it's all relative)

It is worth stressing that the social impact of the Internet in general and the impact of UCC-related pass-times and communication on society and personal relations have not yet been researched in detail. The spectrum of predictions ranges from Internet communications leading to the “breakdown of personal relationships and social contact” to Internet communications “holding great promises for improving real life relationships and tasks”. Recent assessments point to people communicating more than ever but that their pattern of communication and interaction has changed (Statistics 121 Canada, 2006). There is also insufficient understanding of how media consumption generally affects brain processing, learning, attitudes, and behaviour, e.g. the impacts of virtual worlds on behaviour, or on learning/skills (see also OECD, 2005d for skills in the context of online games).
More research in these fields is warranted.

Page 97

Should it be read? If so, by whom?
Sort of, if you're a sad anorak who wants to be able to boast about reading OECD reports in the original bureaucratese.

Other things on this theme I have read/seen that I'd recommend
The FT has a good tech coverage, though they seem a little over-enamoured of Twitter.

Couple of articles I read recently

Is Google Making us Stupid?
Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic Monthly, July 2008

The Autum of the Multitaskers
Walter Kirn, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2007

Pretty entertaining "Web Crashes" Onion TV story...

See also another dwight towers posting, on "The Angel of History"

Which includes a plug for/link to Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil

Other things on this theme that I should get round to
Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott- it's on my list of books for 2009!

Other things by this author that I should get round to
blah

When/where I first encountered this author
blah

When/where I bought this book
Library book, cited somewhere that I can't now remember

Angels of History, Morning and Harlem

Walter Benjamin, patron saint of cultural studies, famously wrote;

"There is a picture by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. In it, an angel is depicted who appears as if trying to distance himself from something that he stares at. His eyes and mouth gape wide, his wings are stressed to their limit.

The Angel of History must look this way; he has turned to face the past. Where we see a constant chain of events, he sees only a single catastrophe incessantly piling ruin upon ruin and hurling them at his feet.

He would probably like to stop, waken the dead, and correct the devastation - but a storm is blowing hard from Paradise, and it is so strong he can no longer fold his wings.

While the debris piles toward the heavens before his eyes, the storm drives him incessantly into the Future that he has turned his back upon.

What we call Progress is this storm."

Which sort of knocks Juice Newton's Angel of the Morning and U2's Angel of Harlem into a cocked hat, eh?

On "Progress", I'd recommend

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology by Langdon Winner
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway by Clifford Stoll
All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
Anything on technoscience by Donna Haraway or Cynthia Cockburn

I mean to get around to
The Myth of Progress by Tom Wessels
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright
False Dawn by John Gray
Vandana Shiva's latest stuff